PALO ALTO, Calif. - The most striking thing about visiting Silicon Valley these days is how many creative ideas you can hear in 48 hours.

Jeff Weiner, the chief executive of LinkedIn, explains how his company aims to build an economic graph that will link together the whole global workforce with every job being offered in the world, full-time and temporary, for-profit and volunteer, the skills needed for each job, and a presence for every higher education institution everywhere offering a way to acquire those skills.

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, explains how his online storage and collaboration technology is enabling anyone on any mobile device to securely upload files, collaborate and share content from anywhere to anywhere. Laszlo Bock, who oversees all hiring at Google, lays out the innovative ways his company has learned to identify talented people who have never gone to college. Curt Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, which invented Siri for your iPhone, recalls how a leading innovator told him that something would never happen and "then I pick up the paper and it just did."

What they all have in common is they wake up every day and ask: "What are the biggest trends in the world, and how do I best invent/reinvent my business to thrive from them?" They're fixated on creating abundance, not redividing scarcity, and they respect no limits on imagination.

Then, after you've been totally energized by people inventing the future, you go back to your hotel room and catch up with the present: the news from Washington. Two headlines stand out like flashing red lights: House Speaker John Boehner says immigration reform in 2014 is off the table, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the "fast track" legislation we need to pass vital free-trade agreements with the European Union and some of our biggest trading partners in the Asia-Pacific region is off the table. Forget about both until after the 2014 midterm elections, if not 2016.

Summing this all up, The Associated Press reported on Feb. 9 something that you could not make up: "WASHINGTON (AP) - Little more than a week after Groundhog Day, the evidence is mounting that lawmakers have all but wrapped up their most consequential work of 2014, at least until the results of the fall elections are known."

What a contrast. Silicon Valley: where ideas come to launch. Washington, D.C.: where ideas go to die. Silicon Valley: where there are no limits on your imagination, and failure in the service of experimentation is a virtue. Washington: where the "imagination" to try something new is now a treatable mental illness covered by Obamacare and failure in the service of experimentation is a crime. Silicon Valley: smart as we can be. Washington: dumb as we wanna be.

True, some libertarians in Silicon Valley cheer Washington's paralysis. But it is not so simple. There is a certain "league minimum" that we need and are entitled to expect from Washington, especially today. America just discovered huge deposits of energy and gold at the same time. If extracted with environmentally sound practices - will give us decades of cheap, cleaner energy and enable America to restore itself as a center of manufacturing.

At the same time, the dominance of U.S. companies in cloud computing and the "Internet of Things" - billions of devices with sensors - have given us a huge lead in the era of big data.

In such an era, one of the two most valuable things Washington can do to create more good jobs and wealth is to open more export markets. The other is to have an immigration policy that not only provides a legal pathway to citizenship for those here illegally but enables America to attract the best brainpower and apply that talent. But Washington these days won't even do the league minimum.

"Studies suggest that proposed deals with Asia and Europe could generate global gains of $600 billion a year, with $200 billion of that going to America," The Economist said.

The U.S. trade representative, Michael Froman, told me that if we're able to conclude these two trade deals, America would have free trade with "two-thirds of the world." If you combine that with our lead in cloud computing, social media, software and natural gas for low-cost manufacturing, you understand, says Froman, why one European CEO told him America will be the "production platform of choice" for manufacturers all over the world to set up their operations and export to the world. But it will all have to wait at least until after 2014 when we might have a week to legislate before we get ready for 2016.

Thomas Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner.